The Chime of the Moment

[Image: night view of House Attack, a 2006 installation by artist Erwin Wurm — a real house, turned upside down and embedded in the roof at Vienna’s Museum Moderner Kunst (MUMOK). See the daytime look here.]

From whiskey river (which, I think, offered an especially rich selection this week):

Everything That Acts Is Actual

From the tawny light
from the rainy nights
from the imagination finding
itself and more than itself
alone and more than alone
at the bottom of the well where the moon lives,
can you pull me

into December? a lowland
of space, perception of space
towering of shadows of clouds blown upon
clouds over
new ground, new made
under heavy December footsteps? the only
way to live?

The flawed moon
acts on the truth, and makes
an autumn of tentative
silences.
You lived, but somewhere else,
your presence touched others, ring upon ring,
and changed. Did you think
I would not change?

The black moon
turns away, its work done. A tenderness,
unspoken autumn.
We are faithful
only to the imagination. What the
imagination
seizes
as beauty must be truth. What holds you
to what you see of me is
that grasp alone.

(Denise Levertov [source])

…and:

The beginning of being fine is noticing how things really are.
1. Life is uncertain, surprises are likely.
2. If you are alive, that’s good; lower the bar.
3. In a dark place, you still have what really counts.
4. If you are in a predicament, there will be a gate.
5. What you need might be given to you.
6. The true life is in between winning and losing.
7. If you have nothing — give it away.

(John Tarrant [source])

…and:

Time is constantly passing. If you really consider this fact, you will be simultaneously amazed and terrified. Time is passing, even for tiles, walls, and pebbles. This means that every moment dies to itself. As soon as it arises, it is gone. You cannot find any duration. Arising and passing away are simultaneous. That is why there is no seeing nor hearing. That is why we are both sentient beings and insentient beings.

(Norman Fischer)

…and:

I have always been delighted at the prospect of a new day, a fresh try, one more start, with perhaps a bit of magic waiting somewhere behind the morning.

(J. B. Priestley)

Not from whiskey river:

Used Book

What luck — an open bookstore up ahead
as rain lashed awnings over Royal Street,
and then to find the books were secondhand,
with one whole wall assigned to poetry;
and then, as if that wasn’t luck enough,
to find, between Jarrell and Weldon Kees,
the blue-on-cream, familiar backbone of
my chapbook, out of print since ’83 —
its cover very slightly coffee-stained,
but aging (all in all) no worse than flesh
though all those cycles of the seasons since
its publication by a London press.
Then, out of luck, I read the name inside:
The man I thought would love me till I died.

(Julie Kane)

…and:

Visitation

Last night you called me out to the December dark
to look up and see what neither of us had ever seen
before: a burnished flock of Canada geese, bent
into a flexed bow and heading south across a clear-
starred moonless sky in silence, winging it
to warmer quarters, and all lit up — like mystery,
I thought, a lit thing bearing nothing but the self
we see and savor but know no more the meaning of
than I know what in the cave of its fixed gaze
our cat is thinking. The geese were lit to the shade
of tarnished gold or dead oak leaves hanging still
in sunshine, or the color tall reeds have when
car-lights stream and splash over them in winter.
And they were — these beings moving as one —
a mystery to us: Why, we asked, their color, who
by daylight are simply black-winged shapes
quickening southwards across a sky-blue canvas?
How could they be lit from below like that, from
somewhere near where we stood on the earth
we shared with them, staring up, the earth that
for this inhabited minute or two must have been
giving off a light that made these creatures shine
for us who were there by chance, with no moonshine
to explain it? Then they’re gone, gone dark, gone on,
though in their aftermath the cold dark we stood
our ground in was for a little while neither cold
nor dark but a place of visitation, and we were in it.

(Eamon Grennan)

…and:

It’s all embedded, the hours and minutes, words and numbers everywhere, he said, train stations, bus routes, taxi meters, surveillance cameras. It’s all about time, dimwit time, inferior time, people checking watches and other devices, other reminders. This is time draining out of our lives. Cities were built to measure time, to remove time from nature. There’s an endless counting down, he said. When you strip away all the surfaces, when you see into it, what’s left is terror. This is the thing that literature was meant to cure. The epic poem, the bedtime story.

(Don DeLillo, Point Omega)

…and:

Grace Comes Like a Little Bird

Grace comes like a little bird
alighted on the tree, or now the grass

A sudden reprieve from despair,
from dark thoughts and
words harshly spoken
in the deep velvet rooms of the soul.

Windowless, they go on and on and you get lost there
you begin to forget about day.

Grace has no reason to come
You did nothing to deserve it.

The bird becomes a lake
The lake, an open window

You don’t ask bitter questions.
You step out into it.

The roadside blackberry brambles
drip with fruit unasked for.

Nothing holds back
And you find your arms unfolding
beneath you on the grass

You give yourself over for the evening,
for however long it might last, without question.

Oh, please, without question.

(Melissa Reeser Poulin [source])

Finally: what, you may wonder — well, I always have — is that tink-tink-tinkly instrument which plays throughout Tchaikovsky’s “Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy”? I thought it was a xylophone, or a glockenspiel. Something like that.

Something very like that, as it happens. The score at that point calls for something called a celesta: a sort of glockenspiel housed in a piano-like cabinet. Wikipedia:

The keys are connected to hammers which strike a graduated set of metal (usually steel) plates suspended over wooden resonators… The sound of the celesta is similar to that of the glockenspiel, but with a much softer and more subtle timbre. This quality gave the instrument its name, celeste meaning “heavenly” in French.

How about that?

Anyway, here’s the chime of the moment, courtesy of the London Symphony:

[Below, click Play button to begin Dance of the Sugar Plum Fairy. While audio is playing, volume control appears at left — a row of little vertical bars. This clip is 2:16 long.]